Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

Noreen Mitchell is a librarian with the Toronto Public Library.

This is the second work in a planned trilogy that began with Nights
Below Station Street, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award
for fiction. Richards writes again of the foibles and frailties of the
people and of the cruelty of life in a small mill town in New
Brunswick’s Miramichi region. The narrative thread picks up the lives
of Ivan Basterache and his wife, Cindi; not yet wed two years, the two
are now separated after an ugly quarrel. The root of the matter is a
debt owed by Ivan’s blustery but unsuccessful father, Antony, to his
neighbors. Antony is a boastful and meddlesome sort whose good
intentions are corrupted by his selfishness and insecurity. His
capriciousness is a source of frustration to Ivan and leads to the
novel’s tragic end.

So many of the actions of Richards’s characters seem senseless; their
“obscure motives” are incomprehensible both to Ivan and to the
reader. The complexity of seemingly simple situations and people is
revealed gradually, with elements of antagonism, hopelessness,
tenderness, isolation, and sadness exposed. It is perhaps the stark
brutality of life as it is depicted here that is most memorable, but the
author also shows a clear understanding of human behavior: “Ivan saw
in these few days that Ruby wished for Cindi to once again have this
fun, to bring her into it, in a manner which would seem once and for all
to exclude him. For it he advanced on them to stop it, it would only be
proof of the puritanical, brutal strain Ruby was now convincing herself
and Cindi that he had. . . . He did not know that people used words like
shotgun blasts in the dark.”

This book is a fine and powerful follow-up to Nights Below Station
Street, but can be read on its own with the impact little diminished.